Congregationalists and Presbyterians were hardly strangers in colonial America. Though from different lineages -– the former from English stock and the latter of Scotch-Irish descent -– there was a growing kinship between them.

The 1648 Massachusetts Cambridge Platform affirmed the “substance” of the doctrine of the recently-written Westminster Confession of Faith (even while commending congregational over presbyterial polity). The 1708 Saybrook Platform of the Connecticut Congregationalists went a step further, establishing consociations to handle disputes arising in churches, which more closely resembled Presbyterian practice.

In the words of Williston Walker, the Saybrook Platform “produced a feeling of sympathy with the Presbyterians of the middle colonies, rather than the more independent Congregationalists of Massachusetts.”^[1] The ministries of Jonathan Dickinson, Aaron Burr Sr., and Jonathan Edwards embodied this affinity: all three were Congregationalist ministers who became Presbyterians.

By 1766, Presbyterian ministers of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia and the Congregational ministers of the General Association of Connecticut began annual conventions “in order to promote objects of common interest to both denominations.” High on that list was preserving religious liberty, specifically against the threat of the establishment of the Church of England in the colonies, and both parties supported efforts to secure that freedom through political independence.

After the American Revolution, the newly established General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States expressed its desire “to renew and strengthen every bond of union” between the two bodies, recalling “with much satisfaction the mutual pleasure and advantage produced and received by their former intercourse.”^[2] Presbyterians began to seat Congregationalists as fraternal delegates to General Assemblies, with the privileges of deliberation and voting.

Attention was now directed to establishing churches on the rapidly expanding American frontier (a challenge that expanded when the Louisiana Purchase more than doubled the size of the new republic in 1803). Between 1790 and 1820, over 800,000 emigrated from southern New England alone to the frontier. By 1830, the population of New York surpassed 1 million, the Erie Canal making the state more accessible, and the population of Ohio exceeded that of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

The harvest was great, but the laborers were few. Presbyterians were desperately short of ministers: at the time of its first General Assembly, it recorded 419 congregations but only 111 ministers. With hundreds of newly-settled communities without churches, Methodists and Baptists raced to ordain men with limited training and sent them out in itinerant ministry. Presbyterians and Congregationalists were handicapped by their commitment to proper ministerial formation. The frontier would not wait, but their mission efforts could be strengthened and ministerial shortages overcome by eliminating divisive competition between the two.

Comity between the churches reached formal recognition with the 1801 Plan of Union. Jonathan Edwards Jr., president of Union College, presented the plan to the General Assembly as a fraternal delegate from the Connecticut Congregational Association. Later, Congregational associations in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts entered the agreement. At first, the agreement focused on New York and the Connecticut Western Reserve (what is now northeast Ohio). Eventually, the joint partnership extended further west into Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

The Plan began with these words: “It is strictly enjoined on all their missionaries to the new settlements, to endeavor, by all proper means, to promote mutual forbearance, and a spirit of accommodation between those inhabitants of the new settlements who hold the Presbyterian, and those who hold the Congregational, form of Church government.”^[3] The Plan went on to describe how congregations called ministers, related to other churches, and conducted discipline. Under these terms, communicants from either denomination in a new community could form one congregation, call a pastor from either denomination, handle disputes by appeals to Presbytery or a special council, and choose to organize according to Presbyterian or Congregationalist polity.

The Plan promoted the missionary interests of both groups and enabled the growth of Congregational associations and Presbyterian synods. The challenge for both parties was practicing “mutual forbearance.” This would come to be tested in three ways: the administration of mission churches, the interaction of differing polities, and the maintenance of doctrinal unity.

Differences arose early over the best methods for the evangelization of the frontier, as Presbyterians generally sent an itinerant missionary over a large circuit and Congregationalists established a minister in a small parish. Presbyterians yielded to the approach of Congregationalists because it proved more practicable in pastoral care.

Congregationalists also cooperated with interdenominational agencies such as the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American Home Missionary Society, and the American Education Society (whose focus was funding the ministerial training). These were among the many voluntary societies that comprised the “evangelical benevolent empire” of the 19th century. The American Bible Society, the American Temperance Society, the American Sunday School Union, and like groups were well-endowed, pan-Protestant efforts to reform and preserve morality in American public life, especially on the frontier.

In the early years of the Plan, Presbyterians joined Congregationalists in allying with these missionary societies, grateful for the funds they provided, even while the General Assembly established a standing committee on missions in 1802. The reorganization of that committee into a more powerful Board of Missions in 1816 occasioned its rivalry with independent mission organizations. As some Presbyterians reasoned, if evangelization is the calling of the church, the proper channel was through the church mission board.

A similar sense of denominational stewardship grew among Presbyterians about theological education. Ashbel Green overtured the 1805 General Assembly with this petition: “Give us ministers is the cry of the mission field; Give us ministers is the importunate entreaty of our numerous and increasing vacancies; Give us ministers is the demand of many large and important congregations in our most populous towns.”^[4]

From this plea came the establishment of Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812. The plan for the theological seminary described its purpose in this way: “To form men for the gospel ministry, who shall truly believe, and cordially love, and therefore endeavor to propagate and defend, in all its genuineness, simplicity, and fullness, that system of religious belief and practice which is set forth in the Confession of Faith, Catechisms, and Plan of Government and Discipline of the Presbyterian Church.”^[5] Princeton would serve the church with ministerial formation that was a thorough and coherent inculturation in Presbyterian faith and practice.

Meanwhile, a significant development in the Congregationalist-Presbyterian cooperative was the “Accommodation Plan” that the Synod of Albany proposed in 1808, whereby it invited the Middle Association of Congregationalists in New York state to become a subordinate division (in effect, a presbytery) within the Synod. This was extended to ministers and also “the delegates from your churches, whom we are willing to receive as substantially the same as our ruling elders, to assist us in our public deliberations and business.”

The invitation included this remarkable concession: “Knowing the influence of education and habit, should the churches under your care prefer transacting their internal concerns in their present mode of Congregational government, we assure them of our utmost cheerfulness in leaving them undisturbed in administration of that government, unless they choose to alter it themselves.” This meant that a Congregationalist consociation of churches would be received as a Presbytery within the Synod, whether or not it followed Presbyterian practice.

This combined strength, the Accommodation Plan imagined, would turn the Synod into “a great Phalanx against the common enemy, and combine exertions to advance the mediatorial Kingdom of our exalted Lord.” ^[6] When this Plan received General Assembly approval, Congregationalist churches took the Presbyterian label with complete liberty in their internal governance.

As other Synods followed, the practical result was the establishment and growth of many presbyteries composed almost entirely of functionally Congregationalist churches. By sheer numbers, it seemed that Presbyterians were the winners of the Plan of Union. From 1800 to 1830, it grew from 13,470 to 173,329, nearly a 13-fold increase, and a rate four times the population growth of the nation.

These numbers did not escape the attention of Congregationalists who perceived the plan working to their disadvantage. Lacking the organization and cohesiveness of Presbyterianism, Congregationalism encountered more modest growth. One minister regretted the many churches “which have been spirited away from Congregationalism.”^[7]

Nathanael Emmons, an early opponent of the Plan of Union, saw no matching the perceived strength of Presbyterianism: “When the lion and the lamb lie down together, the lion has little to fear.” ^[8] A later historian, A. H. Ross, claimed that the Plan of Union “carried over more than two thousand churches, in origin and habits Congregational, to the Presbyterians.” ^[9]

But not every Presbyterian claimed victory. Samuel Baird expressed the sentiment of many in his 1868 history of this period. “The multiplication of Congregational ministers in the Presbyterian Church,” he wrote, “was no increase of strength; but the introduction of an element of weakness, division and heresy.”^[10] “Presby-gational” came to describe the hybrid character of churches. For some, it was a disparaging dismissal of a mongrel church, the suspicion growing that the enlarged Presbyterian church was “Yankeeyed” by New England influences.”^[11]

For others, “Presby-gational” captured the genius of the Plan of Union. The prominent minister Lyman Beecher, whose career alternating between Congregational and Presbyterian callings symbolized the fluidity of Congregational and Presbyterian identity, observed, “A presbytery made up of New England men, raised Congregationalists, is the nearest the Bible of anything there is. But if you go to sticking it up, Scotch fashion, with appeals, etc., I wouldn’t put myself into the hands of such a power over all the United States.”^[12]

References to New England pointed to the greatest challenge of the Plan: It was the means by which theological innovations entered the Presbyterian Church. Jonathan Edwards was a vigorous defender of Calvinism, but many of his students took to his experimentation more than his confessionalism. One of Edwards’ closest students, Samuel Hopkins, taught at Andover Seminary. His “New Divinity Theology” (so named by opponents because it was altogether a new system of theology) revised the doctrine of original sin.

More radical were the modifications from Nathaniel W. Taylor, who taught at Yale Divinity School and was the father of the so-called New Haven Theology. Denying the imputation of Adam’s sin, Taylor posited that moral inability owed to the voluntary act of the free agent, not from a depravity inherited from Adam. Or as he put it: “Sin consists in the sinning.” He went on to abandon the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement.

Followers of the New Haven Theology referred to it as “consistent Calvinism,” and it conformed well with the revivalist spirit of the Second Great Awakening. For Presbyterian opponents, it was neither consistent nor Calvinistic, but was a heresy entering Presbyterian churches through the back door of union pulpits. Efforts began in the courts of the church to curtail the spread of these deviations. A pastoral letter of the Synod warned churches about “the opinions usually called Hopkinsian.” The General Assembly, while commending the synod for “promoting strict conformity to our public standard,” warned against introducing “a spirit of jealousy and suspicions against ministers in good standing.” ^[13]

In 1831 the Presbytery of Philadelphia condemned the sermon by Albert Barnes of First Presbyterian Church titled, “The Way of Salvation.” A Princeton graduate who later came to embrace the teachings of Taylor, Barnes was vindicated by a majority at the General Assembly, which directed the presbytery to put the matter to rest. In reflecting later on his ordeal, Barnes expressed his gratitude for the New England theologians who “divest [Calvinism] of some of its harsh and rigid features … to show how in its essential features it accorded with the true laws of the mind.”^[14]

The Princeton Seminary faculty engaged in sustained polemics against Hopkins, Taylor, and their followers. By 1830, the term “Old School” gained currency for opposition to the agitation emanating from New England. Princeton’s counterpart and center of influence for the “New School” was Union Theological Seminary in New York, founded 1836. Historian Robert Hastings Nichols suggests that in the folklore of that school, its name owed to its “Plan of Union” spirit. Though he concedes that story is contested, he adds, “certainly the seminary originated among Presbyterians of interdenominational mind.” ^[15]

The Old School was convinced that the Plan of Union was badly flawed. More than that, it was unconstitutional, because it had never been submitted to the General Assembly and thus was never constitutionally established. This meant that all churches and ministers that had been brought into the Presbyterian Church through the provisions of the Plan had no legal standing in the church. (What may have been overlooked was the 1808 Plan of Accommodation, which had received General Assembly approval.)

The Princeton faculty, known as moderates within the Old School party, sought to avoid schism in the church, even while commending greater conformity to the standards of the church. But when Old School commissioners found themselves in the majority at the 1837 General Assembly, they seized the opportunity to take drastic action.

“As much confusion and irregularity from this unnatural and unconstitutional system of union,” the Assembly declared by a 143-110 vote, “it is hereby abrogated.” And because this action was retroactive, the General Assembly removed four Synods (the Synod of Western Reserve and the three New York synods of Utica, Geneva, and Genesee), 28 Presbyteries, 509 ministers, and about 60,000 communicant members.

The same 1837 General Assembly affirmed that the proper channel for missions was its own Missions Board. It called on the American Home Missionary Society to “cease and desist to operate within any of our churches.” And it urged members to support the Board, lest the work of missions be “wrecked and lost amidst the quick sands and whirlpools of theological error and heretical innovation.”^[16] An entry from the diary of Princeton Professor Samuel Miller captures how intrusive and disruptive independent agencies had become in the church:

I am now more fully convinced … that voluntary associations for conducting domestic missions and for educating young men for the holy ministry ought never to be encouraged by those who prize the purity and peace of the church. They constitute a machinery, by which men out of the Church, and not responsible to her, may enter her pale, govern her affairs, and corrupt and control her ministry. I am now satisfied that the partial concessions which I made … in favor of voluntary associations for such purposes, were neither wise nor safe. I am perfectly persuaded, that it may be laid down as an unqualified rule: No voluntary association are or ever to be countenanced, which enables men who have no responsibility to the Church, to interfere with or govern her affairs. ^[17]

The split was formalized in the following year, as ministers and churches sympathetic to the exiled synods departed with them: altogether 533 churches and 100,000 communicant members. The church was divided nearly in half into New School and Old School denominations, both claiming to be the “True Presbyterian Church.” Thus the Plan of Union became the path of division, and that, ironically, on the 50th anniversary of the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA.

New School Presbyterians continued the Plan of Union for a time. However, Congregationalist enthusiasm was waning as it, too, developed a stronger denominational identity. So the Plan of Union came to an end in 1852 when the Albany Convention of Congregationalists abandoned it by unanimous vote. Some New School Presbyterian congregations used the occasion to return to their Congregationalist origins. The sense of exhaustion in the Convention was expressed by one commissioner in these words: “They have milked our Congregational cows, but they have made nothing but Presbyterian butter and cheese.”^[18]

For Presbyterians, the Plan of Union tested the boundaries of Presbyterian faith and practice. Throughout its operation, the struggles and controversy generated two conceptions of the church. It drove some to a more refined expression of Presbyterian connectionalism. Others of a more ecumenical mindset saw it as pointing the way for Presbyterians to advance the kingdom by outgrowing their sectarian prejudice.

The Plan of Union is no longer, but these rival versions find advocates two centuries later. Debates continue about the role of extra-ecclesiastical organizations, the practice of church polity and discipline, and the nature and extent of confessional subscription, as American Presbyterians continue to ponder how the adjective “American” relates to the noun “Presbyterian.”

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The complete series can be found here.

John Muether is Dean of Libraries and Professor of Church History at Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, and a ruling elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

1. Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1960), p. 514. ↑
2. William Warren Sweet, Religion on the American Frontier: Vol. 2, the Presbyterians (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), p. 39. ↑
3. Maurice W. Armstrong, et. al. The Presbyterian Enterprise: Sources of American Presbyterian History (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), p. 103. ↑
4. Quoted in Sweet, The Presbyterians, p. 78 ↑
5. David B. Calhoun, Princeton Seminary, Vol. 1: Faith and Learning, 1812-1868 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994), p. 416. ↑
6. Quoted in Robert Hastings Nichols, Presbyterianism in New York State: A History of the Synod and its Predecessors (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963), p. 84. ↑
7. Robert Hastings Nichols, “The Plan of Union in New York State” Church History 5 (1936): p. 29. ↑
8. Sweet, The Presbyterians, p. 47 (quoting from the memoir of Nathanial Emmons). ↑
9. Nichols, “The Plan of Union”, p. 30. Nichols’ own study of the subject led him to conclude that this was “a gross exaggeration, based not on ‘thorough study’ but on the heated imagination of a denominational zealot.” Nichol suggested the total number of churches was closer to 145. ↑
10. Nichols, 29. ↑
11. William W. McKinney. The Presbyterian Valley: 200 Years of Presbyterianism in the Upper Ohio Valley (Pittsburgh: Davis & Ward, 1958), p. 253. ↑
12. Lyman Beecher, Autobiography of Lyman Beecher (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1961), I:80. ↑
13. E.H. Gillett, History of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Publication Committee, 1864), 2: 222. ↑
14. Quoted in Ernest Trice Thompson, Presbyterians in the South (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1963), 1: 397. ↑
15. Nichols, “The Plan of Union in New York,” p. 47. ↑
16. Sweet, The Presbyterians, p. 689, 832-33. ↑
17. Samuel Miller, The Life of Samuel Miller (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1866), 2: 444.↑
18. Quoted in Nichols, Presbyterianism in New York State, p. 150. ↑